Molly was dressed in a green-and-red jumpsuit. Her hair had been dyed black and gelled and waxed into spikes. The high collar of her outfit was encrusted with large fake emeralds. The pants were straight-legged. Her shoes were pointed green brogues.
She felt hip and cool. When she looked in the mirror she hardly recognized her made-up face, or her eyes that had been defined to look Egyptian. Tonight was the night. The Tokyo Dome stadium had been booked. And Molly planned to strike down every last person there with her music.
Molly picked up the ebony forked guitar that Chokichi had lent her. She took the coin from her chest pocket and rubbed it. She winked at herself in the mirror. For a second she saw her reflection, as though she were a human-shaped coin, with variegated edges. The imaginary human-shaped coin in the mirror winked back at her. Molly knew that her mind was playing tricks on her because she was so excited.
There was a knock at the door. Miss Sny poked her head in and nodded respectfully. “Excuse me, Miss Moon, you are due on the stage in three minutes.”
Cool as ice, Molly left her dressing room. She stepped through blue and white lights that lit her way to the microphone at the front of the stage and drank in the stadium’s atmosphere. The applause from the hordes who had come to see her was tinglingly thrilling. Smiling, Molly hitched her guitar strap over her shoulder and took the neck of the guitar in her left hand.
Teasingly, Molly plucked her guitar’s top string. A high note tinged out into the night. Molly, of course, had no idea what note it was. Nor did she care. She was already anticipating what a thousand notes from her guitar would do to this audience. She stepped up to the microphone.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Tonight, I’m going to play”—Molly raised her right arm high in the air—“tonight, I’m going to play . . . ROCK ’N’ ROLL.”
Molly brought her hand down hard and smacked the guitar’s strings with her fingers. She was brilliant. The audience went wild. Each sequence of perfectly executed notes was like a web spun by a master spider. The more the crowd listened, the more they became caught—trapped like flies. Molly drank up the applause. And, she had to agree, the music she was producing was genius.
And then she moved toward a drum kit that had been set up onstage. People could not believe it. This girl’s skills were nothing short of miraculous.
Molly thrashed the drums, rolled them, beat the bass, tapped the snares, and crashed the cymbals. And then, she was finished.
The audience went crazy—so crazy that one of the usherettes who was selling Molly’s CD worried that the building might collapse from all the excitement.
Molly was calm. Everything was going according to plan.
Gerry, Rocky, and Petula saw the helicopter, a tiny dot in the sky, getting larger and larger. And now they shielded their eyes from the wind of its rotors as it landed on a cleared space on the dock.
After being found, the friends had been forced to sit in the smelly truck to wait to meet the boss of the whale-meat operations. Time had passed to the horrid noise behind them of the chainsaw whining as it cut up the dead whale.
They were so exhausted when they were manhandled out of the truck that they felt nothing but numbness.
And then they saw Mr. Proila. Dressed in a black suit and a long black coat, he stepped out of the helicopter and began walking across the dock toward them.
“So,” he said, sneering at Gerry, “I should have guessed that the little eco-warrior would try to spoil my fun.” He pulled Gerry’s camera from his neck and lobbed it into the deep harbor basin. “You idiot brats!”
Gerry stared at the monster in front of him and, to his surprise, instead of saying something furious, he found himself saying, “I feel sorry for you, Mr. Proila. You don’t have a single scrap of goodness in your heart, do you? I wonder why. Maybe it’s because no one ever loved you when you were a little boy. That is really sad.”
Mr. Proila hadn’t expected this. He looked as though Gerry had slapped him. For a moment, he was speechless. Then he snapped, “Put them in the cell. Let’s give them a nice long time to think about their little let’s-save-the-world moment and whether it was worth it.”
And without another word, he turned on his Cuban heels.